Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Red Wheelbarrow video

This is striking and beautiful, but it also reminded me of a very different interpretation of William Carlos Williams's poem: in a seminar I took with him long ago, James Longenbach pointed out that WCW was very into modern painting, and it had crossed his mind to interpret the poem not as a realistic description of a real scene but as a modernist abstract painting with a blob of red and a couple blobs of white, with a bit of silver on the red as the "glaze." (Hat tip to SR!)